Disney has been telling us to follow our hearts since 1950. In the movie Cinderella, the song “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” tells us that to be happy, we must “follow our hearts.” The phrase raises important questions: Is it good or bad advice, sometimes reliable or never reliable? And what does it truly mean to follow one’s heart? To explore this, we must first define what the heart is and how it differs from the mind or conscience. One way to think of it is that the heart is the seat of emotions; the mind, the center of intellect and will; and the conscience, the moral regulator of both. Whether or not one agrees with this distinction, the discussion requires careful consideration of how these elements interact and whether the heart should ultimately be trusted or followed.
First, let’s try to define what is meant by the “heart.” A good way to think about this in our context of the 21st-century American is to ask this question: Am I my brain, or am I a person who uses my brain? That’s usually how I start this conversation with my students when I teach on this to give them an understanding of the way we think about it as Americans who tend to believe we are literally our brain.
What’s most difficult for us to grasp today is how the Old Testament uses the term heart. We tend to take our Greek philosophical minds to try to understand Old Testament verbiage. The Greeks have taught us to analyze things, and that’s a good thing. When we analyze, we take things apart in their perspective pieces and try to understand the whole from those parts. The mistake we often make is that we begin to take those pieces that we took apart from the whole and actually see them as independent ideas that stand autonomously from each other.
Now, all of this is important because we long to do this dissection. When it comes to the heart, we want to segment it into pieces. When the Old Testament speaks of the heart, sometimes it refers to the mind. Other times it refers to the emotions. And sometimes it refers to the will. In our Greek way of thinking, we’ve made these distinctions: mind, will, and affections—which is fine to do. However, when we actually begin to think about the heart, we must think about what Proverbs 4:23 says: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”
What we find in Proverbs 4:23 is that the heart is the one who is doing the thinking, willing, and feeling. In other words, the heart is the person behind these activities. It’s the difference between what something does and what something is. So, when we talk about the heart, we’re talking about an “is”; this is the person. When we do things, we will, we feel, and we think, but the person behind those activities is the heart. So, really, the heart is the ultimate you, the unsegmented you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson states in Self-Reliance (1841), “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.” This statement is a perfect example of how our society has come to believe what the heart is. Our society has segmented the heart into mere feelings and then said that’s all the heart is.
This philosophy really stems from the thinker Friedrich Nietzsche. You might recognize him as the one who said, “God is dead.” He is the famous atheist philosopher who believed there was no real truth and that we could know nothing for sure except what our bodily desires tell us is true. Anything outside the body is uncertain, but the body can tell us what is truth to us. Nietzsche would say that if we’re going to be rational, we must obey what our body tells us and what our body desires. According to Nietzsche, obedience to the body is the most rational thing to do.
Now, as Christians, we would call unfettered feelings outside of Christ’s redemption “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” But Nietzsche would call these feelings “the body’s truth” that must be obeyed. If God’s Word tells us to say no to these feelings, Nietzsche would say that you are becoming a slave, because following your body’s desires makes you truly authentic. And being your true authentic self by obeying your desires, according to Nietzsche, defines you—what we would call today your “identity.”
When the world, be it Disney or Taylor Swift, tells your children to follow their hearts, know that what they are really saying is, “Be happy in the slavery of your sin, because the feelings sin gives you will always meet the expectations of your fantasies.” This is one of Satan’s greatest lies to our children, and somehow, we believe that message is more acceptable when it is delivered by one of Satan’s messengers instead of Satan himself.
Psalm 37:4–5 reads, “Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.” What we find in this Psalm is a condition and then a response to the condition. The condition is “delighting yourself in the Lord,” which produces a kind of self-imposed obligation of the Lord, in which He will give you the desires of your heart. Looking at the grammar closely tells us that God will not give you what you have already been desiring, but rather, He will give you the desires He wants you to have. He actually delivers the desires to your heart, and you begin to desire things you may not have ever desired before. You begin to long for things you haven’t longed for before.
The word “delight” is a word that requires a kind of affection, will, and mindset toward the Lord that is summed up in this word delight. That word has so much meaning behind it. Delighting is not merely affection. It’s not merely my will’s movement toward another. It’s not just our mind focused on another. It’s all those things all at once. Do we have that kind of delight for the Lord? If we have delight for the Lord, He gives desires to your heart. Those desires are worth following.
Augustine speaks of this delight in God as an expression of love for God. When your love is firmly fixed on God, then you can “love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare. Let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good” (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Homily 7, section 8). Augustine would tell us, “Don’t let the world tell your kids to follow their hearts. Teach your kids how to follow God’s heart.”